Tuesday, October 22, 2013

The Strain terrain is really nice. I think it's some of the best (mostly) single piece terrain I've seen. There's a lot of character, it's solid, good texture and details, the pieces that needed it were asymmetrical, and a really good price point (IIRC 50¢ a piece). Good stuff. I expect a lot of Tyranid players will get use out of this kit.

Easily a 9.5/10 (lost in two fields: the rules don't really reflect dimensional terrain and the Exocysts (2nd row, 3rd in/3rd row, 1st) were flat where it was clearly designed to have a mouth)

I also felt like I nailed the colors I had been working on for Strain on these features, too bad it came so late- I'll probably eventually want to touch up the rest of my Strain to match.

Still gross.

I'm not really sure what's up with these ugly, ugly critters. I decided the lumpy spots on their heads would be painted as the nano blue I use, because I just couldn't get my head around why their craniums had ballooned so much (no pun intended). I think they were supposed to be this ugly, but I didn't particularly like them, and felt that the size was pretty out of scale with the rest of the game, particularly since the wave 2 humans were smaller than wave 1. Also, they had spindly parts and awkwardly placed mold lines.

The one saving grace of these was that the tails were interchangeable and, with just a little cutting, so were the heads, meaning that instead of having 2 repeated ugly poses, there are 8 combinations and they were a little posable, meaning there was decent variety. 4/10, mostly because I think they pushed the ugly way too far.

Yup, still gross.

These counters were pretty good. They're definitely functional, considering other models can stand on them.

I wish there were a 3rd pose or that the clothing were a little more generic, but neither of those are that serious. A little more frustrating was that they suffered a little from fear of undercuts- the man's head slopes strangely, as does the woman's chest and one leg. The lack of base detail would have been more frustrating if I didn't have any freehand ability.

It sounds like I'm mostly complaining, but I actually thought these tokens were pretty solid. Even though I guess I should be rating the entire terrain package with one score, I'm not. So, there. 8/10, mostly for functionality, also for grossness.